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Is your stream green? How to make your online TV services more energy-efficient

Environmental organisation Greenpeace has recently updated its Click Clean Report which evaluates the energy demands of the internet and the choices made by individual companies in what energy their products or services use. It showed that many of the most popular online streaming services aren’t as energy-efficient as they can be. Essentially, as consumer demand and content consumption grows, so does the amount of power-hungry servers needed to deliver this programming.

But what can these OTT providers do to limit their energy consumption?

The number of online streaming services has exploded in the last few years and internet-delivered TV is now a key part of peoples’ entertainment consumption habits. The implementation of these content delivery infrastructures has needed to keep up with the fast-growing demand for services.

The speed at which these services have been rolled out and been made available to global audiences means implementing the cleanest possible technologies might not have been at the forefront of these companies’ minds.

And as growth continues – the expectation for higher resolution and better quality content is everywhere – streaming service operators are only going to need more bandwidth and high performance infrastructures. To cope with this explosion in demand, content owners can continue either renting more bandwidth from CDN providers with power-hungry servers or build their own delivery network which gives them more energy efficient options.

Among the many benefits of building your own TV CDN, content owners can benefit from lower energy consumption across the entire delivery infrastructure which is mostly down to the choice of the servers used. Edgeware’s servers are far more efficient than those traditionally used in a CDN – peak consumption is only 100W compared to around 500W used by conventional high-end servers.

This can partly be narrowed down to the build of the servers. Edgeware’s are purpose-built with all the heavy-lifting done by hardware designed just for that reason. The read-write functions bypass the CPU completely, reducing processing cycles and power with the whole system running in solid-state with no moving parts at all.

This 80% saving in the energy needed to power a server, when applied to each one in a network, can drastically reduce the energy needed by a content owner or broadcaster to deliver amazing TV services.